DEFINING PROBLEMS. SHAPING SOLUTIONS . - School of Social Service ...

a d v o c a t e s ’ f o r u m
Community benefits agreements have emerged in both form and
function as the result of a particular set of historical circumstances.
Understanding this history offers an important corrective to thinking of
CBAs as an ahistorical phenomenon or as a neutral development tool.
Locating CBAs in this historical context illuminates the logic behind
the form they have taken and the functions they have performed. This
understanding, in turn, underscores consequences of the prevailing
urban political economy and suggests how CBAs may contribute to the
reconstitution of urban power dynamics and modes of governance.
Community coalitions have worked for CBAs during an era of
neoliberal metropolitan governance characterized by selective preference
for free markets, inhibited redistributive investment in low-income
communities, heightened competition to attract private capital, and public
expenditure on development projects targeted at the immediate benefit
of relatively high-income businesses and people (Abu-Lughod 1999;
Gotham 2001; Harvey 1989; Harvey 2005, 87; Peck 2005). Scholars have
characterized urban economies of this era as “post-Fordist” and “flexible”
partly in reference to the replacement of stable manufacturing jobs with
tenuous, frequently temporary, and low-paying service-sector work and an
associated increase in unemployment (Harvey 1989). That CBAs function
as a redistributive tax on private capital in order to provide well-paying
jobs to local residents and to compensate for locally incurred negative
externalities attests to their place in this post-Fordist and neoliberal urban
economy. That they take the form of contracts between civil- and privatesector—and
even sometimes public—parties accords with the neoliberal
molding for “market-based” solutions.
Considering CBAs in their historical context facilitates the conclusion
that they are, at most, a second-best strategy for promoting balanced
urban growth through investment in low-income communities. Historical
accounts suggest that the decisions of government officials in recent decades
have created narrow channels of possibility for urban development projects,
and that these channels have shaped both the impetus and opportunity for
residents to organize for CBAs. At the same time, the act of organizing and
sustaining CBA coalitions has coalesced previously nonexistent—or at least
inchoate—power. Through CBA processes, coalitions have used this power
to promote economic benefit for low-income city residents and to perform
environmental and labor-related regulatory functions in the absence of
government intervention. In doing so, CBAs and the coalitions organized
to create them encourage re-imagination of the current urban political
economy. By creating space in urban development discourse and practice for
the concerns of their communities and by demonstrating tangible outcomes
in the void left by government inaction, community coalitions expansively
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